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    A History of Lake Norman: Fish Camps to Ferraris
    A History of Lake Norman: Fish Camps to Ferraris
    A History of Lake Norman: Fish Camps to Ferraris
    Ebook155 pages2 hours

    A History of Lake Norman: Fish Camps to Ferraris

    By Chuck McShane

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    About this ebook

    Journalist and historian Chuck McShane traces the triumphs and troubles of Lake Norman from the region's colonial beginnings to its modern incarnation.


    On a muggy September day in 1959, North Carolina governor Luther Hodges set off the first charge of dynamite for the Cowan's Ford Dam project. The dam channeled Catawba River waters into the largest lake in North Carolina: Lake Norman. The project was the culmination of James Buchanan Duke's dream of an electrified South and the beginning of the region's future. Over the years, the area around Lake Norman transformed from a countryside of cornstalks and cattle fields to an elite suburb full of luxurious subdivisions and thirty-five-foot sailboats.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe History Press
    Release dateSep 30, 2014
    ISBN9781625850225
    A History of Lake Norman: Fish Camps to Ferraris
    Author

    Chuck McShane

    Chuck McShane is a writer and historian whose work on North Carolina history and culture regularly appears in Charlotte Magazine and Our State. McShane also researches and writes about public policy and planning for the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute and PlanCharlotte.org. He was curatorial assistant at the Charlotte Museum of History from 2009 to 2011 and holds an MA in American history from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He had been a reporter for the Charlotte Observer.

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      Book preview

      A History of Lake Norman - Chuck McShane

      her.

      INTRODUCTION

      The cove is quiet. It’s early on this Monday morning, but the fishermen are already out on Lake Norman, leaving their empty trailers tied to trucks in the parking lot. See one in the distance, slowly trawling his boat beside a small island. Beyond, trees in full-leaf line the shore. The only sound is the splash and clank of the floating dock as you walk out to get a better view of the heron resting on a rock offshore. It’s hard to imagine, here on the northern tip of Lake Norman, that less than thirty miles away, on part of the same lake, a very different scene plays out. Commuters on Interstate 77 slam brakes, honk horns and shout obscenities, oblivious to the shimmering beauty of the waters beyond their windshield. Lake Norman is a case study in contradiction. The lake is tranquil and chaotic, pristine and polluted, recreational and industrial—all at the same time.

      Since 1963, when Duke Power (now Duke Energy) dammed the Catawba River and created the lake, its waters have shaped every aspect of life in this corner of North Carolina Piedmont. From a rural area filled with more cows than people to the fast-growing suburb of today, Lake Norman’s identity has been in constant flux. The change has been slow at times and swift at others, but it has been comprehensive.

      Though you can still catch glimpses of rural scenes on the fringes of its shores, the lake has developed in a way few would have imagined when Duke first announced its plans. These days, sailboats and water skis probably outnumber cattle. Lake Norman is home to basketball stars, NASCAR drivers and hundreds of thousands of others. That wasn’t what James Buck Buchanan Duke, Gil Wylie and William States Lee had in mind, more than a century ago, when they launched plans that would result in Lake Norman. Still, the lake and the land around it has been a boon for their company. Not only does Duke Energy produce electricity though hydroelectric, steam-generating and nuclear plants around the lake, but the company has also benefitted from real estate development on the surrounding shoreline, much of which Duke once owned.

      A map of Lake Norman and the surrounding area. Map design by Chuck McShane. Shapefiles courtesy of NC OneMap.

      A heron perches on rocks in the middle of Lake Norman near the Iredell–Catawba County line. Photo by Chuck McShane.

      The lake began as a quiet retreat, made of weekend cabins and fish camps, with miles of unspoiled shore and uncrowded waters. Today, when most people think Lake Norman, they think of boat docks in the backyards of big houses or long commutes and heavy traffic.

      So, what happened?

      Let’s start at the beginning.

      1

      THE CATAWBA AND ITS PEOPLE

      Before the lake there was the river. Approimately 320 miles of slow-flowing water trickling from the cool springs of Mount Mitchell, North Carolina, down to the hot, sandy valleys of the South Carolina midlands. There, the Catawba-Wateree converges with the Conagree. Together, they become the Santee, which meanders 100 miles more through swamp and bald cypress, into the Atlantic, somewhere between Charleston and Myrtle Beach. The Catawba was never a grand river—neither very broad nor particularly deep. In later years, even smaller ships would find the river impossible to navigate. But for the group of Native American tribes who found it first, perhaps six hundred years ago, its waters would do just fine. The river was so important to the tribes living in the area that they called themselves Kawahcatawba, meaning the people of the river. The Kawahcatawba were less of a tribe and more of a loose federation of smaller, related settlements living in several villages that formed a linear band on either side of the river. There, they took advantage of the rich bottomland—a rare, fertile crescent in the otherwise rocky and clay-filled Piedmont region. They lived in small, bark-covered homes with rounded roofs and grew corn, squash and beans in fields nearby. The men used canoes to fish in the river and hunted passenger pigeons with three-foot-long blowguns. Warfare was common, and they stood guard against potential encroachment from the Cherokee, whose lands bumped up against Catawba territory in the west. Catawba mothers flattened their infant sons’ heads so that they would look more threatening when they grew into men and warriors.

      European explorers arrived early. In the mid-1500s, Hernando de Soto passed nearby on his quest for gold. Twenty years later, Juan Pardo and his men established several forts near the Indian villages. The largest of these forts was probably Joara, near present-day Morganton. About twenty Spanish soldiers lived in Joara for about eighteen months in the 1560s. Eventually, the tribes tired of the arrangement and killed off all but one Spaniard. It would be almost two hundred years before permanent white settlers returned to the region, though traveling traders from France and England often lived among the Catawba. The Catawba tribe was known for its pottery bowls, baskets and mats. Those goods proved valuable bartering currency, but trade with Europeans was deadly to many Catawba. Though the Catawba had, by the early 1700s, allied themselves with the British who were beginning to populate the eastern reaches of the state, alliances did not inoculate them from disease. Almost half of the tribes’ estimated five thousand members perished in the 1738 smallpox epidemic. Their villages stood abandoned and rotting. By 1780, only five hundred Catawba remained.

      The River and the Great Wagon Road

      White settlers started arriving in the late 1740s. Scots-Irish families mostly, but some Germans came as well. They had been priced out of the increasingly crowded valleys of Pennsylvania and Maryland. They were tired, too, of the long reach of the Anglican Church, which demanded taxes and fees to record marriages and feed their clergy. Many Scots-Irish had little use for religion, and those who did were Presbyterian. Neither wanted anything to do with the Anglicans, and they resented paying fees to support them. One Anglican itinerant minister received an angry welcome to Mecklenburg County in the 1760s. A group of Scots-Irish settlers chased him away, saying they wanted no Damned Black Gown Sons of Bitches near their settlement.

      A mile west of the Catawba River, in what would become Catawba County, Adam Sherrill built one of the first permanent European homes here, most likely a simple log structure, near a ford (a shallow and narrow spot in the river good for crossing). As more settlers arrived from the North, Sherrill’s Ford and other crossings connected the loosely settled landscape. On the eastern side, and farther south, the Torrences, the Jettons and the Pottses farmed wheat and corn and raised hogs and cattle. Life centered on two institutions: the churches and the crossroads taverns. Most people grew what they ate and sold what they couldn’t. The farmers would turn any extra corn or peaches into liquor to get use out of them before they spoiled.

      After a long trip down through the Appalachian Valley on the muddy and rocky Great Wagon Road, the settlers found what they were looking for: fertile land where they could be left alone.

      They wouldn’t be left alone for long, though. The settlers here had never been friendly with the British colonial authorities. So, when news reached the area that British soldiers had fired on a Massachusetts militia in 1775, it didn’t take much convincing for the Catawba River settlers to support the revolution against the British. Some joined militia units or Continental army regiments and set off to the battles in the North. The war stayed far to the north for its first years. However, the Catawba area would not be spared. During the British southern campaign, in late 1780, the British passed over the Catawba several times. In January 1781, local militia and soldiers who were camped out near Cowan’s Ford heard news of British forces approaching the river from the southwest. Early on the morning of February 1, the British troops reached Cowan’s Ford and charged across the deep wagon ford. Several British horses drowned, and the American militia picked off a handful of British soldiers. The five thousand redcoats proved too much for the nine hundred ragged colonials; the British overpowered the colonials, who scattered east along the muddy road to Salisbury. General William Davidson was killed in the battle, shot through the heart with a rifle bullet. The next day, British troops led by Banastre Tarleton reached Torrence’s Tavern, near present-day Mount Mourne, where many colonial militiamen had retreated to regroup. Tarleton caught the colonials by surprise. When Tarleton and the redcoats arrived at the tavern, they chased the colonials, many of them drunk and carrying flasks of whiskey, out of the tavern. Then, Tarleton burned the tavern to the ground and destroyed the militia’s camp nearby.

      A Revolutionary War

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